Elitebook 650 G9 SSD upgrade

[L_Kehrseit]

I have an HP EliteBook 650 G9 with a 256 GB M.2 SSD 2280. I need to upgrade to a larger size. Since I got the version 6F2N7EA, my mainboard has a second M.2 slot, however it has B-Key. Therefore, according to other discussions here (https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Second-ssd-drive-on-elitebook-...) I have no possibility to install a second SSD, am I right?

The HP specs state that the largest size is 1TB for my laptop model and version. But I suspect that was the maximam SSD capacity that HP offered via factory. Can I go larger, to 2TB or more? And is there any other specification besides M.2 2280 and PCIe 4x4 that I need to be careful with?

In an earlier post with a similar question concerning the HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3 (https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/SSD-upgrade-for-Elitebooks/m-p... it was stated, that the mainboard can handle more than 1 TB. Does this also apply to my laptop?

Thanks in advance for your help on this.

Best regards,

L_Kehrseit

[TzortzisG · Accepted solution]

Hello L_Kehrseit.

You're pretty much right about everything you said. Can you use the B-keyed WWAN slot for a second SSD? Short answer NO. Long answer.....if you manage to find an old used B+M ssd like the one tk_srq correctly suggested (these are always small sized drives -128GB/256GB) you might actually get it to work. However, it will be very slow (WWAN slots have only one PCIe lane) and won't have the rock solid reliability every user wants on a storage drive. Newer drives tend to not work correctly at all, just like you read on the thread you linked to.

Can you go higher than 1TB? Short answer DEFINITELY YES. Long answer......NonSequitur777 EXPERT Level 11 has (as always) correctly posted what is pretty much true for all modern HP laptops. A 4TB drive is considered compatible, for larger drives the odds are good, they just haven't really been tested yet. The 650 G9 has been tested with 64GB RAM and 4TB drives, so feel free to purchase one if you so wish it. You can take a look at the Amazon upgraded 650 G9 4TB model. There are no special specifications you need to know, I'd just like to point out that there is no reason at all to get an outrageously fast gaming Gen4 SSD with a heatsink, for what is actually an office laptop. Just get any plain Gen4 PCIe SSD from any reputable manufacturer like WD, Kingston, Crucial, etc, etc. Personally, I stay away from Samsung PCIe SSDs, because they often have compatibility issues with HP laptops -especially the high-performance ones (the pro versions). If you don't mind it being "only" 2TB, my personal favourite is the new Gen4 Western DIgital blue drive, the SN580, that has good speeds with a moderate power consumption that allows for better battery times.

Post back if you have more questions. Take care!

[L_Kehrseit]

Hello TzortzisG,

Thank you very much for your detailed and helpful reply! Especially your long answers helped to understand the problem of the second SSD on the one hand and the issue of the size of the SSDs in the 2280 M.2 slot on the other fully. Therefore I'll refrain from the idea of installing a second SSD in my Elitebook.

It's really great news that the Elitebook can handle up to 4TB without issues, however, I'll stick to 2TB  by now, since this suffices me totally right now. Unfortunately, i planned to buy a Samsung 980 Pro (without heatsink) before reading your post and would like to ask for advice, which one would be a good idea. I personally sticked to Samsung by now, since their SSDs are known for a high reliability, same as Toshiba for HDDs, which would be Kioxia for SSDs. I've read mixed reviews concerning the reliability of Western Digital drives, but that applied to their HDDs, therefore I'm a bit puzzled, which to choose. I mainly use the laptop for writing and reading and editing large PDFs (book scans sometimes of more than 100 pages with up to 200MB), often with many programs running at the same time. Therefore a quick reaction time concerning reading  would be the most important thing.

Take care and thanks in advance for your help

[TzortzisG]

I'm glad you found the information useful L_Kehrseit. You're actually just doing the research I did some years ago when I wanted to upgrade my 650g8 and later on the same model you have, the 650g9. I agree that it's not a good idea to attempt the SSD-in-WWAN solution because even if it works, it won't work well and I seriously doubt you'll get the results you're looking for.

I don't like to insist on buying or not buying specific brands or models of anything. This was actually an exception because I got the WD gen4 blue drive I suggested and had very good results, especially in the power consumption/drive temps areas. The Samsung drives have legendary performance and reliability. I've been the biggest fan of their SATA models for many years. I would still be using Samsung PCIe drives on HP laptops if it weren't for one little tiny thing called COMPATIBILITY. Contrary to common belief, PCIe storage is not just a more recent version of earlier PATA/SATA HDDs/SSDs. These are PCIe cards that perform the function of storage. In that respect, they bear a closer resemblance to a GPU or a WIFI card. A PCIe SSD's controller has to work well with the motherboard (through the firmware) and directly connect to your CPU. This is why even the slowest PCIe SSD outperforms the fastest SATA SSD. Completely different structure of the connection to the processor on the system. This, however, also has a drawback. Sometimes one might find that a particular SSD won't work well with the system. The laptop might refuse to detect it at all, or it might have low speeds, or there may even be strange hardware conflict issues. If you visit HP's forum long enough, you start to realize that most of these (rare) issues come up when users go for the ultra-fast Samsung PCIe SSDs, or some of the Gaming SSDs by other brands. Obviously this has to do with the BIOS. HP doesn't offer a lot of options on their BIOS setup to solve any compatibility issues, so if this comes up all you can do is wait for a BIOS update that might help.

So, does this mean that if you get the 980 PRO it won't be compatible? I haven't tried it myself, but I'm pretty sure you'll be fine. Just because I tend to avoid them doesn't mean you have to. And by the way, HP installs Samsung PCIe SSDs on many laptops, but they're the OEM (branded) versions. I think that if this is really the drive you want (980 PRO) you should definitely give it a shot.

Having said all that, and probably given a longer explanation than you wanted, let me answer your question concerning speed. This might be considered as heresy by some, but differences in PCIe drives aren't really noticeable in everyday system use. The kind of work you described doesn't really require anything faster than a good quality Gen3 drive. People were doing these exact same things with fast SATA SSDs just a few years ago. You need to have very specific data-intensive uses in mind to actually need the kind of speeds the 980 PRO or 990 PRO have to offer. Therefore, in my view, anything you decide to get will be perfectly fine for your needs (performance-wise).

[L_Kehrseit]

Thank you very much, TzortzisG, for your very detailed and very helpful information. I just wanted to let you and other forum members know that I've bought a Crucial P5 Plus 2 TB SSD storage and it works extraordinarily good in combination with the laptop. It's super fast now. I decided against the Samsung 980 Pro simply because of the price - there was a really good offer (105€) for the Crucial drive. Thanks again for your help, everything is now as I wanted it.